Wasteland: A First Look

Chilling video of gang members confessing to mass murder of missing Mexican students

*In this video from the Attorney General’s Office the detained gang members confess and reenact their crimes.

The disappearance of 43 college students in southern Mexico that has gripped the country and drawn international attention came closer to a resolution last night, after the Attorney General’s office released videos depicting the chilling confessions of gang members who said they participated in the massacre of the students.

In the videos, three alleged gang members describe how they received the students, killed them, threw their bodies in a dump, and used diesel and gasoline to burn the bodies. They returned the next day to put the ashes and bones in trash bags, which they dumped in a river, according to the confessions in the video.

Parents of the missing students say the videos don’t present enough evidence to lead to them believe that their sons were murdered. The parents say they want to see scientific evidence that the remains discovered so far – ashes and bones found in trash bangs – belong to their children. Attorney General Jesús Murillo said that forensic experts will continue to work to identify the remains, though extracting DNA would be “very difficult.”

But the confessions are the most compelling evidence produced by authorities so far as to the ultimate fate of the students. Murillo said that municipal police in the city of handed the students over to the Guerreros Unidos gang, who worked closely with the mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca. Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, were arrested this week in Mexico City after going into hiding. Investigators believe the pair were the “intellectual authors” of the crime and ordered the killings because they believed that the students intended to interrupt a political event being held by Pineda that night.